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Particle Physicists Facing Insane Competition For Work
Jim_Austin writes "Teams of hundreds of young scientists — including many grad students and postdocs — staffed the Large Hadron Collider and helped make one of the most important scientific discoveries in recent decades. Now they must compete for just a handful of jobs. Quoting: 'The numbers make the problem clear. In 2007, the year before CERN first powered up the LHC, the lab produced 142 master's and Ph.D. theses, according to the lab's document server. Last year it produced 327. (Fermilab chipped in 54.) The two largest particle detectors fed by the LHC, the A Toroidal LHC Apparatus (ATLAS) and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS)—which both independently spotted the Higgs—boast teams of 3000 and 2700 physicists. By themselves, the CMS and ATLAS teams minted at least 174 Ph.D.s last year. That abundance seems unlikely to vanish anytime soon, as last year ATLAS had 1000 grad students and CMS had 900. In contrast, the INSPIRE Web site, a database for particle physics, currently lists 124 postdocs worldwide in experimental high-energy physics, the sort of work LHC grads have trained for. The situation is equally difficult for postdocs trying to make the jump to a junior faculty position or a permanent job at a national lab. The Snowmass Young Physicists survey received responses from 956 early-career researchers, including 343 postdocs. But INSPIRE currently lists just 152 "junior" positions, including 61 in North America.'"
they are always looking for quants from what i hear
What this says is that every rich person in this country is lying through their teeth about needing immigrants. We have highly trained scientists and engineers. The percentages of people who have the right attitude and mental attributes to succeed in this line of work has remained constant for as far back as we've had standardized testing results. There has been no shift of the basic personality types from one to another; Each generation has had the same proportions as the previous.
What it means is that nobody wants to invest. And scientific progress is an investment. It doesn't give you the immediate payoff of, say, a sequel to the Fast and the Furious (what are they up to now, seven of those infernal movies?). Science isn't formulaic. There's no spreadsheet that says "And after you spend $100 million developing a drug for cancer, you'll get this as a reward. Spend $200 million, and you'll get a free t-shirt too." Science growth mirrors our own; We grow in spurts, with long periods where nothing seems to be happening, periods where change is slow, and occasional paradigm shifts.
This isn't very amiable to the current "get rich quick" culture the Boomers are espousing as they approach their retirement. They're sucking every corner of society dry looking for a quick way to monetize, any incremental way to earn a profit without much risk. And science... well, it's too risky for them. They don't care about future generations, or a cure for cancer, or putting men on the moon again. They want botox and comfortable retirements.
This is society reaching back and giving people who love science the middle finger. It's saying "We don't need you, because your contributions aren't immediate. You live in the future and we're trying to recapture our past." So unless science comes up with a cure for aging, or a time machine, it's not getting funding. And that's really all there is to this story. It's about greed, pure and simple. Nobody gives a damn about tomorrow, because for the people holding all the cash... their tomorrows are running out.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Doing what you love rarely puts bread on the table and a car in the garage. Just ask a musician.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
When the resonance cascade occurs, we'll be able to just zerg-rush the bastards with PhD-and-crowbar equipped theoretical physicists. Aliens won't stand a chance.
wall street, looking for oil
what about any math heavy job?
I was in a similar position once, but I hooked on with the US government as an engineer and did my last 15 years as a mathematician. Comfortably retired now.
With that kind of brainpower, there should be some startling developments in the next couple of decades.
It will be an interesting test of the fungibility of brainpower. You don't become some sort of high-powered physicist by being an idiot; but the process that produces physicists doesn't necessarily groom or evaluate candidates for doing not-physics, so we'll see what sort of not-physics they end up getting up to.
With that kind of brainpower, there should be some startling developments in the next couple of decades.
They still need to find a way to eat. That's the point.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This should be no surprise, since these positions are for pure scientific research with no way to calculate the ROI for the money spent. Countries have debt problems caused by borrowing and their budgets are already stretched to pay benefits for retirees and other non-workers. Add a long recession, a weak recovery, and very little prospect for robust future economic growth, and ultimately you don't end up with the sort of fiscal environment that can support lots of pure research.
Wealthy societies have discretionary funds for things like pure scientific research. Poor societies have to struggle just to get by. If you want more pure research, you need more people in your society to be employed productively. And you need them to generate lots of wealth -- far beyond "the amount they need" or "their fair share" -- so there will be a lot extra left over for things like pure research.
You don't become some sort of high-powered physicist by being an idiot
You do need to be somewhat of an idiot, at least about finances. PPs get paid very little in grad school, only a little more afterwards, and often end up in the unemployment line at the whim of legislative budget committees. The same thing happened when the SSC was cancelled in America. Is there any other career where brainpower is rewarded less?
This isn't new. It's been that way in high-energy physics since A-bombs stopped being cool. After WWII, there was a huge interest in getting into physics, and large numbers of PhD physicists were produced. The U.S. Government hired a lot of them. Nuclear weapon design became excessively fancy, much to the annoyance of today's workers who have to maintain the old bombs.
Then, after the US had produced enough bombs for the next few world wars, the nuclear establishment wound down. Los Alamos got into all sorts of strange non-nuclear stuff like chaos theory. Lawrence Livermore became a senior activity center for aging physicists. The average age of the membership in the American Physical Society went up by six months each year. That was back in the 1990s. It hasn't gotten better.
When the USSR wound down, there was a US effort to find jobs for old Soviet nuclear experts. The worry was that they'd go to work for somebody who still wanted to build a bomb or two. Some came to the US.
"Same as you, Arthur. I hitched a ride. After all, with a degree in maths and another in astrophysics it was either that or back to the dole queue on Monday."
Young people should not go into physics expecting to become tenured professors. It might happen, but it's unlikely. And besides, why would you want to? Because your professor thinks you should aspire to it? It's actually not that great a job.
However. physics is still a great field of study because you can take it so many places. You can do engineering that engineers can't do because while they know the shortcuts while you know the fundamentals. I know a number of physicists who work in medical imaging, for example. The best RF engineer I know has a physics degree. A physicist needs great math skills, and unlike mathematicians, needs to be able to apply them in the real world. A smart physics student will take some classes outside of physics, and make mental connections between fields. If you're at a university, you should exploit the situation (and avoid being exploited).
The labor markets are saturated, and wealth is concentrating on the top. There just isn't a market for lots of labor anymore, manufacturing is increasingly automated, services like retail is becoming more automated (thanks Amazon!), so why not soak the rich and use the money to support more research instead of letting all that capital idle at the top?
Because that's EXACTLY what is happening now. All that capital is idling at the top, the middle/lower classes are underpaid and underemployed and not generating demand.
How about we fund a "research class" instead of a "leisure class"?
--PM
If we're going to open our doors to foreign technology workers, it shouldn't be because some technology or pharma executive wrote an editorial in the WSJ.
Well, said... As someone moving to SF on an H1B next month, I'm usually pro the H1B program :) :)
:)
But I do want to point out that not everybody abuses the H1B program.
I'm not relocation from a third world country, or to work at a third world salary, in fact could get similar wage here... actually I could just do job remotely.
Or get a well paying job at a company here... but the job wouldn't be as fun
I think mobility is important for many reasons, in my considerations are things such as SF having a lot of tech companies, startups and etc...
I don't know if I'll apply for a permanent visa at some point, but if I move back the contacts I'll be making will be invaluable, on both ends.
At the end of the day, if you don't let tech workers from around the world in, tech workers from around the globe will cluster in another valley.
Note. with all the NSA scandals, lack of welfare, poor security, crime, human rights violations, war crimes, etc. that the US has got going, I'm starting to wonder why I'm relocation.
On the other hand, I did all the paper pushing... So I might as well try it out
Anyways, feel free to tell me why the US is so awesome, I kinda need it...
I was there when the SSC was cancel, ready to move to Dallas and then found I didn't have a job start date (cause it was canceled).
Luckily for that time, The Internet showed up and 15yrs later from that detour I'm trying to get back into pure Physics.
For the younglings of today trying to excerise the power of the Force (literally, f=ma, mind that), I'm not sure what they'll drop into if they don't get a position at places like LHC since headcount is very tight and current senior positions are occupied in young PhDs with another 20yrs going for them. Social Media and Wall Street are dying out, but there maybe some hope with "Big Data".
Labor costs could be reduced without any wage or salary changes by cutting the costs of liability and regulatory compliance. Beyond that, various taxes could also be cut. Profitability could be increased through similar changes -- especially by cutting the US corporate tax rates from the world's highest to a rate more in line with international norms. If we want (the benefits of) a wealthier society, we should think about these and other ways our society can be wealthier.
Umm not. Labor costs are not particularly affected by regulation and liability. Nor are they affected by taxation. It is only corporate profitability that is affected. Which is already at an all time high. Corporations don't need to be more profitable to hire people. Corporate cash accounts are at all time highs.
The reason we have a labor glut? Demand is down and worker productivity is extremely high. So we have record low labor force participation. Unemployed people consume lots less than employed people.
Do you know who else consumes relatively little (as a proportion of their income)? Very rich people.
What do we have in the US right now? A real crappy distribution of income. A shrinking and lower income middle class. Until the consumer class starts growing again demand will stay low and along with it labor force participation.
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
http://disciplinedminds.com/
http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/182889/
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/04/05/1522215/getting-a-literature-phd-will-make-you-into-a-horrible-person
http://www.bio.net/bionet/mm/bioforum/1997-December/025426.html
http://100rsns.blogspot.com/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Simple fact:
Every tenured professor is expected to train N new PhD's over the course of his career, with N >> 1.
Exponential growth, meet finite resources.
No hints of physics beyond the standard model? Well, you should move to Japan and specialise in neutrino physics then. There's loads of weird shit beyond the standard model that the Super K managed to find. The fact that neutrinos have even been shown to have mass at all is a pretty damn big hint at physics beyond the Standard Model.
There is an idea that popularising particle physics and astronomy encourages young people to be interested in careers in science. What it actually does is encourage young people to be interested in careers in particle physics and astronomy. The result is a glut of specialists in those particular areas while other disciplines are starved of good people. Those offering posts in other areas of physics find it hard to get good candidates in their field and sometimes have to hire and re-train specialists from these popular areas (if they are prepared to take the job in the first place).
How many of those new PhDs become tenured professors? It's not exponential growth at all.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
I've noted that here in Canada. In fact the engineers have managed to set up their own medieval guild structure so that, by law, you cannot have a physicist do certain jobs which they are more qualified to do than engineers e.g. teach physics! At one point they were even trying to get laws passed so that only engineers could work in any team designing ANY electronic circuit - fortunately that failed.
However if you get away from the pure engineering jobs and start to look at R&D or even in finance and you'll see lots of physicists. The data mining you do for particle physics coupled with the logical investigative/inference skills and a good understanding of large computer systems is extremely useful for mining financial data and making predictions. I know many colleagues who have left particle physics for the finance sector. Likewise R&D often requires that you know how things work which is where physicists often have the edge on engineers - although you'll undoubtedly be work with engineers to build things. This is a very similar model to physics research and again I've seen many colleagues take this route too. While the job crunch in particle physics is very severe at the moment if you look at the overall employment rate of physicists it is extremely high partly because a physics degree is so flexible.